WATTS 2 bak
5/17 age of trump but also bak
see worrell ~ rockefeller fdn
no merri
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2 24 not heard a while
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GMAIL
Marc Morano
Weekly update ⋅ October 3, 2025
The Climate Realist President — The Climate Realism Show #175 - The Heartland Institute
The Heartland Institute
Join Anthony Watts, Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, Jim Lakely, and special guest Marc Morano of CFACT for this live broadcast. Tune in LIVE ...
LOOK IN MIRROR: Krugman Accusing Right of Having 'Fossilized Minds' Is Pretty Hilarious
Newsbusters
But as Climate Depot founder Marc Morano told MRC Business: “Krugman needs to examine how energy is produced to understand why coal is a crucial ...
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bs
“…the world’s most viewed climate website”*
– Fred Pearce The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth about Global Warming
“…invaluable” – Steven F. Hayward, The Weekly Standard
“…changed the world and is one of the most influential resources on global warming. – Jonathon Moseley, American Thinker
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gmail to newsbusters
IT'S SUMMER, NITWITS! NPR Blames ‘Climate Change’ for Texas Floods and ‘Rainstorms’
July 18th, 2025
the cuts to National Public Radio’s taxpayer funding have definitely been a long time coming. The leftist outlet is blaming climate change (there’s a surprise) for — wait for it — a lot of rain, in summertime!
[pix]
“Climate change is fueling brutal rainstorms. Here's how to stay safe,” read the ridiculous headline for NPR’s July 15 Consider This podcast by All Things Consideredco-host Juana Summers (ironic) and Climate Desk correspondent Michael Copley, both of whom are not scientists.
Of course, Summers exploited the Texas flood disasters as a springboard to blame rainfall and recent flooding writ large in the U.S. as being a byproduct of the left’s eternal boogeyman: climate change. “So why is climate change expected to make extreme rainstorms like the ones we've seen this month more common,” Summers teased. “To dig into that question and what people can do to prepare, I spoke with Michael Copley from NPR's climate desk.”
Copley then went for the typical climate activist drivel: blame the darn humans! “So people keep releasing a ton of greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels like coal and oil, and that's raising global temperatures and fueling more intense rainstorms that drop more water in shorter periods of time,” he spewed. What’s telling is that he said the quiet part out loud when he prefaced his statement by admitting,“So in general, a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture.” No kidding, Sherlock! But he insisted that “we're going to see more extreme weather events as the Earth keeps heating up, and that's going to pose bigger threats to people and their homes and cities.”
Climate Depot Founder Marc Morano blasted NPR's eco-fanaticism in comments to MRC Business. "Listening to or reading climate 'news' from NPR was a throwback experience to the days when the U.S. actually funded such tripe. Oh, wait! We still do," Morano rebuked. "But as of July 17, it looks like the days of U.S. taxpayers footing the bill for utter climate garbage are severely numbered."
Morano then tore apart NPR's arguments to shreds:
NPR rehashes all the same old scare tactics about extreme weather and, in particular, how 'climate change is fueling brutal rainstorms.' There is just one glaring problem with NPR's reporting. Even the United Nations' climate reports don't agree with the soon-to-be defunded network. On climate timescales, flooding and flash floods are not increasing globally, nationally, or locally in Texas, contrary to NPR claims.
Further, noted Morano, "the United Nations, the US federal National Climate Assessment, and peer-reviewed studies all show that extreme weather, ranging from hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, and droughts, is not increasing on climate timescales of 30, 50, or 100 years."
As CO2 Coalition Science and Research Associate Vijay Jayaraj wrote in an WAtts up bs April 21 op-ed using BBC] monsoon-afflicted India as a case study for summer climate, “The average annual rainfall between 2000 and 2023 shows us that there is no crisis. The early 2000s experienced several significantly wet years, with 2003 recording nearly 49 inches of precipitation.” In addition, wrote Jayaraj, “From the mid-2000s to the early 2010s, there was a notable decline in rainfall, with 2009 being especially arid.”
What the data indicates is that there is “no discernible trend of increasing or decreasing precipitation throughout the period.” The overarching principle, Jayaraj concluded, was that “climate fluctuates” in summer. Did Summers or Copley consider that possibility? Probably not.
So what’s Copley’s solution to the climate problem? Ah yes, just throw an ungodly bunch of tax money at it: “[Columbia Business School climate economist Gernot] Wagner says communities need to invest billions and billions to deal with more extreme weather.”
*Listen to NPR's entire 10-minute climate propaganda below.
omg bbc link undermines
Monsoon mayhem: Why lashing rains wreak havoc annually in India's cities
...But experts say climate change has made erratic weather - such as unseasonal rains, flash floods and droughts linked to extreme heat - a more regular phenomenon, directly affecting millions of people.
This year the monsoon arrived a week early in parts of southern India, catching authorities unprepared.
"A depression developed over the eastern central Arabian Sea which was instrumental in pulling up the monsoon current," says Mahesh Palawat, vice-president of meteorology and climate change at weather forecasting company Skymet.
In Delhi, the Minto bridge has become a symbol of the city's annual monsoon chaos. Almost every year, after heavy rain, a bus or lorry gets stuck under the bridge - an image that highlights the city's struggle with urban flooding.
This year, Delhi recorded its wettest May since 1901, with more than 185mm of rainfall, according to the Indian weather department.
...
ref 2 watts up
Summertime Reality Twisted Into Climate Exasperation
By Vijay Jayaraj
Growing up in the sun-scorched plains of Southern India, where summer temperatures often flirt with 104 degrees Fahrenheit, I learned early that extreme heat is not an anomaly but a seasonal reality to be expected. Yet, all of us confront the metaphorical heat of relentless rhetoric from climate alarmists who insist our planet is overheating beyond the point of salvaging.
In Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore), the city I now call home, climate narratives often echo global hysteria. Headlines scream of “record-breaking heat” and “unlivable cities,” yet the data – raw, unfiltered and grounded in reality – tell a different story, one that challenges the hyperbole regularly sweeping over the public.
On average, a Bengaluru March experiences 17 days where temperatures reach or exceed 93 degrees. This year has been no different. We recorded exactly 17 days of 93 degrees or above in March – right on par with the 15-year average. Far from the apocalyptic predictions of endless heatwaves, this summer has been, in a word, normal.
Over the past 15 years, from 2010 to 2024, temperature records for the months of February through May show us that there is no summer crisis. The entire summer of 2018, for instance, had only 23 days above 93 degrees, whereas 2023 had 30 days. In contrast, 2016 had 76 days. Does this indicate an existential crisis? Or does it simply affirm that climate fluctuates? It is the latter.
Climate Alarmism: A Manufactured Crisis?
It is not just temperatures. The broader climate narrative is laced with outlandish predictions that fail to materialize. The “end of snow” prophecy, the vanishing of Arctic ice by 2013, and the frequent claims of “hottest year ever” – all have proven misleading at best, deceptive at worst.
Consider rainfall patterns in India, which have a major influence on the livelihood of 1.3 billion people. There is a significant year-to-year variability in precipitation, which is typical of India because of the unpredictable nature of monsoons.
The average annual rainfall between 2000 and 2023 shows us that there is no crisis. The early 2000s experienced several significantly wet years, with 2003 recording nearly 49 inches of precipitation. From the mid-2000s to the early 2010s, there was a notable decline in rainfall, with 2009 being especially arid. The latter segment of the dataset, spanning from 2019 to 2022, indicates a duration of consistently elevated rainfall levels.
There is no discernible linear trend of increasing or decreasing precipitation throughout the period. The data reveal fluctuations between wetter and drier years. This variability underscores the intricate nature of India’s monsoon system and its susceptibility to diverse climatic factors.
Now, imagine asking the city’s 14 million residents to relinquish their ambitions for an uninterrupted power supply based on coal as a fuel in favor of unreliable “green” technologies such as wind turbines to address a fabricated climate crisis.
Sadly, such requests are made by activists and media outlets that peddle worst-case scenarios as inevitabilities, ignoring historical weather records and honest science. The result? A public psyche primed to view every warm day as a portent of apocalypse.
Individuals are not only subjected to feelings of guilt regarding the supposed degradation of the Earth’s climate, but they are also deceived into thinking that erratic wind and daytime solar energy can supply baseload electricity required by their urban and industrial centers.
The truth is summers are hot, particularly in the middle latitudes of my city. And there is nothing the climate industrial complex can, or should, do about it.
This commentary was first published at California Globe on April 21, 2025.
*Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at theCO~2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. Heholds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India.
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mma 2 24
On January 31, Fox News host and serial climate denier Jesse Watters pushed debunked misinformation to argue that climate scientists are “cooking the books.”
In an effort to disprove that 2023 was the hottest year on record, Watters repeated a bogus claim that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s placement of thermometers on urban concrete skewed temperature data.
“Concrete and asphalt attract heat and retain heat a lot more than the countryside,” Watters said. “No wonder we think the earth’s warming. We’re literally cooking the books."
:{Video
CitationFrom the January 31, 2024, edition of Fox News' Jesse Watters Primetime
Watters then cited a post from X user @_ClimateCraze claiming that “improperly located” thermometers “produce unrealistic warming through the Urban Heat Island effect.” Conveniently, Fox News cropped out a portion of the post — a link to a debunked “study” from junk science blogger and climate denier Anthony Watts. The 2022 report, produced by fossil fuel-funded think tank the Heartland Institute, falsely claims that 96% of U.S. climate data is “corrupted” due to thermometer placement
Multiple news outlets and fact-checkers have disproved the Heartland Institute’s bogus study as it spread across social media, with Agence France-Presse noting that past claims about biased data from urban temperature monitoring sites have been “thoroughly refuted.”
PolitiFact pointed out that Heartland’s false claim that the data is corrupted “ignores key facts” including:
First, climate scientists know that weather station data can be impacted by poor siting, and they adjust data accordingly.
Second, climate change analysis focuses on changes over time.
Further, PolitiFact noted that the scientific community has rejected this claim:
"The correct approach is to write a scientific paper and submit it to a scientific journal," said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist currently serving as research lead at Stripe, a San Francisco-based technology company. "In this specific case, the author of the report, Anthony Watts, submitted a paper on the topic around 10 years ago, but was unable to successfully convince other scientists of the validity of his findings and to pass the peer review process."
Watters’ reliance on climate misinformation is no surprise; Fox News has repeatedly proved itself to be a shameless climate denial machine.
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mandy g ref oversight 2017
interesting to compare to 1/6
https://wattsupwiththat.com/**2017/04**/26/demand-investigation-of-uah-shooting/
BS note denials always say funding or even refusal to declare not legit crit but he does it here hypocrisy, note also fake outrage:
dr. John Christy, Alabama state climatologist and atmospheric science professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, points to bullet holes in the side of the building containing his office. Christy believes the floor he works on may have been “targeted” by people objected to his prominence as a climate change skeptic. (Lee Roop/lroop@al.com)
Like everyone here, I am outraged by the terrorist attack of Dr. John Christy’s officeat the University of Alabama (UAH) that followed the so-called “March for Science” (the MfS) where third-sort actors and copywriters pretended to be scientists. I share Dr. Roy Spencer’s frustration about the unwillingness of the local police to investigate this attack and his hope that FBI would investigate. We are now in the “week of action,” declared by the same shadowy forces that organized the MfS. A larger and more disorderly “People’s Climate March” is scheduled for April 29, with riots expected on May 1.The invented “climate crisis” is just a pretext for a power grab, a pretext justifying collusion with foreign powers and political parties.
The investigation of the UAH shooting should start from the top, not from the bottom. The shooter(s) might be hard to find. They might be domestic terrorists or international terrorists. We have no idea whether they acted on behalf of a larger organization, or were just lone wolves inflamed by climate alarmist and/or anti-Trump rhetoric. In any case, a connection to the MfS is very likely. Starting from the top means starting with the MfS organizers and funders.
What do we know about the top MfS organizers? Only one thing: they do not want to be known. MfS publishes neither its physical address nor names of its directors or officers. It does not even tell whether it is incorporated. The MfS National Committee and Steering Committee consist of apparently front men and women. The MfS donations page says:
“The March for Science applied for non profit C3 status in February but is still awaiting final approval. Until that time, we are using Science Debate as a fiscal sponsor to accept tax deductible donations.”
The top MfS organizers can be anybody, from John Podesta to Bill McKibben. I wonder whether the MfS partners and low level operatives know who they are, or even care to know. But, such subterfuge combined with the large scale of operations and potential for physical violence reveals the guilty mind (mens rea) of the top MfS organizers.
Have the top MfS organizers committed any guilty act (actus reus) beyond their suspected connection to the UAH shooting? In my opinion, the answer is yes. I think there is sufficient evidence to investigate and to indict them for obstruction of justice. The MfS website instructs immigrants participating in the march to refuse cooperation and even communication with law enforcement. It does this by incorporating Guides from the notorious National Lawyers Guild. These Guides do not differentiate between the citizens and non-citizens, or between the legal and illegal immigrants. From one of the guides, :{8 WAYS TO PREPARE if Traveling to Washington, DC for Marches or Actions:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}::
“CONSIDER WHAT ID TO BRING. Carefully consider what identity documents you bring on your trip.”
This is obviously addressing criminals with multiple IDs. Applied to the UAH shooting, that might mean to use one ID to buy FN P90 (one of the few weapons chambered for 5.7mm cartridge) and another ID when going to the march.
“CREATE A PHONE TREE Create a phone tree that you can activate in the event that your vehicle is detained. There should be a designated ‘on call’ member … This ‘on call’ member is then responsible for activating other members of the phone tree.”
This is an instruction for the participants to form cells and to act as lookouts for criminals!
“In addition to the tips on the reverse side of this page, we urge you to contact organizations who have a strong history in direct action.”
The euphemism “direct action” covers a broad range of activities from innocent trespass to terrorism.
“LET THE DRIVER INTERACT WITH LAW ENFORCEMENT Only the driver or the designated legal worker/lawyer should be speaking in any law enforcement interaction. … Passengers should be trained under a solidarity plan …”
In other words, do not to talk to the police — even if one sees a crime in progress.
These instructions should not be confused with explaining the constitutional rights. The V Amendment protects individuals from self-incrimination. The VI Amendment allows suspects to be represented by an attorney. Neither of them allows a person to conceal crimes committed by others. Further, these are individual rights. If an organization instructs its members or followers to refuse cooperation with law enforcement, it is committing obstruction of justice. And this is exactly what the MfS had done prior to the UAH shooting. 18 U.S. Code § 1512(b)(3) says:
“Whoever knowingly uses intimidation, threatens, or corruptly persuades another person, or attempts to do so, or engages in misleading conduct toward another person, with intent to hinder, delay, or prevent the communication to a law enforcement officer or judge of the United States of information relating to the commission or possible commission of a Federal offense … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.”
Dr. John Christy is a prominent scientist, deserving, together with Dr. Roy Spencer, a Nobel Prize in physics. Less than a month ago, he testified before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology in the hearing Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method.The UAH shooting looks like retaliation for this testimony. But FBI might be unable or afraid to connect the dots.
I ask the readers to contact the office of the U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions (former Alabama Attorney General) and the Alabama Attorney General, to demand a top-down investigation of the organizations and circumstances that led to the UAH shooting.
——————
Another NLG Guide :{Social Media, Criminalization, and Immigration:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, referred to by the MfS website, advises the participants to:
“Consider cleaning up or deleting your Facebook or other social media accounts. … See below for resources.”
That brings to mind the “case” of Kurt Mix. Kurt Mix was an engineer who helped stop the oil spill after the Deep Horizon disaster. Eric Holder’s DOJ prosecuted Kurt Mix for deleting a few text messages from his cell phone a year after the disaster. Kurt Mix had committed no crime. He had offered his cell phone to the DOJ data collection vendor long before deleting those messages. His text messages contained only a few hundred characters – a drop in the sea compared with petabytes of data available from the video cameras and other sensors on-site. The DOJ had all the information, contained in his text messages, from other sources. Nevertheless, Holder’s underlings charged Kurt Mix with two counts of obstruction of justice, threatening him with 40 years in prison, and rabidly prosecuted the case for four years. The “mainstream media” and self-appointed guardians of civil rights were sympathetic to the persecution. (Some examples: 1,2,3,4,5,6, 7,8,9).
Today, the law can be used againstwrongdoers, rather than bywrongdoers.
https://www.heartland.org/policybot/?author=david-t-stevenson
random bs
NOVEMBER 10, 2022
No Consensus on Climate Crisis, Scientist Survey Finds
By H. Sterling Burnett
NOVEMBER 10, 2022
The Systemic Racism of the Teachers' Unions
By Larry Sand
NOVEMBER 9, 2022
Re-elected Governor Newsom’s Energy Literacy Will Be Challenged Over the Next 4 Years
By Ronald Stein, P.E.
badish code no lnx
E-ELECTED GOVERNOR NEWSOM’S ENERGY LITERACY WILL BE CHALLENGED OVER THE NEXT 4 YEARS
NOVEMBER 9, 2022
By Ronald Stein, P.E.
Maybe Newsom will produce a plan in the next four years to finance the billions of dollars for the roads being used by EV’s or just pass that problem on to his predecessor.
Despite Newsom’s statewide policy decisions that are driving up costs of energy in the state, only a few Californians are upset with the ever-increasing costs for their electricity and gasoline, resulting in the excessive costs of living, increasing homelessness and crime. But most voters have just showed their approval of the bizarre energy policies that Newsom promotes and wish to incur four more years of financial torture.
...
97-percent-climate-consensus-busted
NOVEMBER 8, 2022
97% Consensus on Climate Change? Survey Shows Only 59% of Scientists Expect Significant Harm
By James Taylor, H. Sterling Burnett, Anthony Watts, Linnea Lueken
3 22
Published on March 4th, 2022
Watt’s wrong with this picture? Climate deniers still garbling science to prove… what?
TAGGED:CLIMATE DENIAL, HOCKEY STICK GRAPH, WAR ON SCIENCE, WATTs
(Cartoon by Tom Toles from the Washington Post – get his book on climate change co-written with Dr Michael Mann, The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy)
By Climate Denier Roundup
one of the constant false criticisms deniers make of climate science is that researchers can only get funding for studies that prove climate change is caused by fossil fuels, so they therefore only design and carry out such experiments, and that’s why the overwhelming majority of climate science finds that burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gasses are warming the planet.
Which makes _{the latest disinfo effort from Anthony Watts so amusing}_, because not only does he set out to do exactly the thing deniers accuse legitimate climate scientists of doing, he’s not even smart enough to figure out how to do it himself!
Much like how he _{sought to recruit new essays}_ from his audience with their best climate denial takes, but had to postpone announcing winners because Watts got Covid and moved (and definitely not because he needed more time to get entries that weren’t written in crayon on flattened-out tin foil hats before announcing the results of “_{the ifrst [sic] ever WUWT Essay contest}_” on Friday), he has again turned to his blog readers for help.
Apparently half-inspired by _{denier-for-hire}_ Willie Soon’s _{latest}_ _{deliverable}_, which retreads ground Watts covered a decade ago, about how “the final product” of temperature data that’s been corrected, “is so much warmer than stations that have not been encraoched [sic] upon by urbanization and artificials urfaces [sic] such as asphalt, concrete, and buildings,” Watts blogged.
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/13/2/285
This is the argument that climate scientists have been tricked by the fact that cities are warmer than rural areas and as a result, the temperature record showing warming is actually wrong because really it’s just showing that more thermometers are located at airport runways and next to A/C units blowing hot air on them.
But here’s the thing: Watts and other deniers only “know” that urban areas are warmer than rural ones because of climate science, so while they may think they “discovered” this error, the reality is that scientists have known about the issue all along, and corrected for it, and those are precisely the changes to the raw data that deniers claim are actually making warming look worse.
And _{Watts very well knows that there’s no substance to this theory}_, because he was personally involved in a research project _{testing exactly that hypothesis}_, and despite being _{funded in part by Koch money}_, it _{confirmed the consensus science was accurate}_.
Which is probably why Watts is not actually trying to prove his hypothesis with a scientific “experiment”, so much as trying to simply assert its validity with a demonstration. That’s where the other half of his inspiration comes from.
_{Back in 2011}_, Watts set out on a lengthy, time-consuming effort to prove that a video illustrating the “high school physics” of carbon dioxide warming a small glass jar was actually a great big fake, mostly because it wasn’t shot in a single take and Watts himself couldn’t figure out how to make it work. Watts, of course, blames Al Gore for his inability to get a “high school physics” demonstration right.
Now, 11 years later, Watts has come up with the genius idea of combining these two old, failed pursuits, to create a “visualization” of the concept that urban thermometers bias the dataset. He’s thinking about using “red and blue food coloring” in some vials to show how mixing them up clouds the record. “Some lab equipment, some tubing and some pumps will be needed.” He’s not sure for what, exactly, though, and welcomed “a discussion of ideas on how to do this accurately and convincingly.”
Anthony Watts has had ten years to come up with a decent reason for his continued crusade against the climate consensus. And even the financial support he’s getting from the Heartland Institute in recent years doesn’t seem to have given him any fresh inspiration.
Instead, he’s left reliving his glory days- but even those sucked!
He’s struggling to come up with his own “high school physics” demonstration to revive the hypothesis disproven by a project he himself worked on, and a decade later and none the wiser he’s left crowdsourcing ideas from his blog audience who, as it turns out, are not exactly chock full of valuable science-communications advice.
(Originally appeared at DailyKos)
ref https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/us/ties-to-corporate-cash-for-climate-change-researcher-Wei-Hock-Soon.html
Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher
Wei-Hock Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, whose articles have been tied to corporate funding.]
By Justin Gillis and John Schwartz
Feb. 21, 2015
For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.
One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming. He has often appeared on conservative news programs, testified before Congress and in state capitals, and starred at conferences of people who deny the risks of global warming.
Funding That Climate Researcher Failed to Disclose
These documents show that Wei-Hock Soon, a part-time researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., received funding from fossil-fuel interests that he subsequently failed to disclose in a string of scientific papers.
Continue reading the main story
Demand Investigation of the UAH Shooting! - Watts Up With ...https://wattsupwiththat.com › 2017 › April › 26
Apr 26, 2017 — Dr. John Christy, Alabama state climatologist and atmospheric science professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, points to bullet ...
3/22 theory
see 4th phase fallback delay-ism
when corp FF denial exposed, fallback to trade groups main API NAM (NMA), but as those exposed less safety/cover/buffer, fallback to 2ndary trade assoc
which provide deniability [also $ gets hidden laundered thru DAF and these 2ndary orgs eg CFACT, EID IPAA
eg
bOMBSHELL: ROCKEFELLER FAMILY FUND BEHIND THE “PAY UP CLIMATE POLLUTERS” CAMPAIGN
1 22 random grab
Australia’s Broken Temperature Record (Part 1)
50 mins ago Guest Blogger 6 Comments
It could be that the last 26-years of temperature recordings by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology will be found not fit for purpose and will eventually need to be discarded. This would…
NATURAL CO2 SOURCES
Southern Ocean storms cause outgassing of carbon dioxide
5 hours ago Charles Rotter 46 Comments
Half of all carbon dioxide bound in the world’s oceans is found in the Southern Ocean. At the same time, climate change is expected to result in more intense storms…
ASTRONOMY
Orbital Insertion Burn a Success, Webb Arrives at L2
9 hours ago Charles Rotter 36 Comments
Now that Webb’s primary mirror segments and secondary mirror have been deployed from their launch positions, engineers will begin the sophisticated three-month process of aligning the telescope’s optics to nearly nanometer precision.
ENERGY
Mark Krebs onEnergy Efficiency under Biden’s DOE (Part II of IV: EERE Modeling)
13 hours ago Guest Blogger 29 Comments
Tricks include inflated energy-price forecasts (for the disfavored energy, gas), lowballed maintenance costs for favored appliances (electric), and so on.
CLIMATE DELUSION
Good Housekeeping: Don’t Have Kids, Because Climate Change
17 hours ago Eric Worrall 93 Comments
Gone are the days when Good Housekeeping just told readers how to make a baby bonnet or decorate a nursery.
CLIMATE LAWSUITS
Democracy Dies in Dark-Moneyness: Soros Funding Behind Off-Books Congressional “Staff” to Investigate Political Opponents of Climate Agenda
21 hours ago Charles Rotter 68 Comments
It represents a test of principle for the Republican congressional minority, “Dark Money” scold Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, and any elected congressional Democrats who would like to demonstrate their rhetoric…
democracy Dies in Dark-Moneyness: Soros Funding Behind Off-Books Congressional “Staff” to Investigate Political Opponents of Climate Agenda
:{
From Government Accountability & Oversight
Following up on this story, andrelated complaints filed with congressional ethics watchdog offices, courtesy of **Capital Research Center’s** intrepid Hayden Ludwig we now see that the money behind privately financed congressional investigative staff is coming from none other than George Soros’s Open Society ventures.
Specifically, it appears that $300,000 went from Soros’ c4 (Open Society Policy Institute) to 1630 Fund for Co-Equal Action, with the grant tag, “to support work to enhance congressional effectiveness and oversight”.
Another $282,2000 went to the Hill-support operation courtesy of “eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund Voice in 2019 to ‘provide information and advice that helps members of Congress advance policies and conduct effective oversight.’”
As we now know, thanks to those two ethics complaints and yesterday’s common public right of access lawsuit for records filed against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, et al., that means providing off-books congressional investigators to augment professional staff, improperlyfor any Member or office which partakes, to pursue private party, political opponents.
Which is a donor-dangle to Members to violate not only House Rules but federal law, should they bite. Which House Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Ro Khanna has confessed to doing. As all laid out in those complaints. One recipient of which, the House Inspector General, immediately waved off as not being his job. Even though it seems to fall pretty cleanly within his remit of investigating management of House resources.
Democracy dies in dark-moneyness, etc. Note that this money came via Arabella’s c4 umbrella group — a hard core political entity, not some arguably nonpartisan c3 “charity” or public education institution. For a slew of quotes and critiques of the 1630 Fund c4 by WaPo, Politico et al. see CRC’s compilation here. So, we now know that partisan financing of prosecutorial or quasi-judicial activities goes beyond just Soros prosecutors, above-board and legal, orMichael Bloomberg’s scheme planting privately hired activist prosecutors to pursue his agenda through state attorneys general officeswhich falls into a much grayer area. It extends to off-books congressional staff, who represent a facial violation (by Members who partake) of House Rules and federal law.
This operation — hiding in plain sight courtesy of a New York Times rollout piece so clumsily incurious that it never considered the propriety or even legality of what it nonetheless confesses is revolutionary, a “unique approach” now being tried in apparent response to the election of Donald Trump as President — is a pulse-check for the institution of journalism. But, even though it’s people we like, pushing idea we agree with? It represents a test of principle for the Republican congressional minority, “Dark Money” scold Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, and any elected congressional Democrats who would like to demonstrate their rhetoric about good governance is remotely sincere.
ref1
https://capitalresearch.org/article/new-ethics-complaint-soros-funded-arabella-front-helped-democrats-break-congressional-ethics-rules/
big news is developing on the Arabella front.
Last week, the watchdog group Government Accountability & Oversight filed ethics complaints alleging that House Democrats broke a prohibition on private financing of official congressional business, and an Arabella-run “pop-up” group is at the heart of the still-unfolding story.
House Rule 24 prohibits “outside private donations, funds, or in-kind goods or services” to cover the expenses of a congressional office in order to prevent private interests from gaining untoward influence over public affairs.
According to the complaints, however, the Arabella-run group Co-Equal provided in-kind donations to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform in the form of donor-provided “consultants” and “progressive” litigators to help House Democrats with a year-long investigation into private parties whose political speech has “frustrated” the Left’s climate action agenda.
In other words, if the complaints are true, a nonprofit helped House Democrats break ethics rules to go after so-called climate deniers standing in the way of a Green New Deal revolution. Not good optics for the supposedly politically neutral Arabella Advisors.
Scheming in the Dark
Arabella Advisors is a for-profit consultancy based in Washington, DC. The company commands a set of four in-house nonprofits that collectively brought in $1.7**:{billion:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:** in 2020 alone—and $4.7 billion since 2006—from left-leaning foundations and donors.
Arabella’s nonprofits run hundreds of “pop-up” groups that are little more than websites masquerading as standalone, grassroots nonprofits. Sometimes they operate in twos: Co-Equal is fiscally sponsored by the 501(c)(3) Hopewell Fund, while its lobbying arm, Co-Equal Action, is run by Arabella’s 501(c)(4) Sixteen Thirty Fund.
Enter George Soros. A 2018 document reveals the leftist billionaire granted $300,000 to Co-Equal Action via Sixteen Thirty Fund to“support work to enhance congressional effectiveness and oversight”from his 501(c)(4) Open Society Policy Center—almost certainly referring to Co-Equal’s campaign to illegally fund House Democrats’ climate witch hunt.
Add another $282,000 from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund Voice in 2019 to “provide information and advice that helps members of Congress advance policies and conduct effective oversight.”
Tried and True?
This isn’t the first time liberal donors have tried to “help” Congress pursue their climate opponents. In 2019, Michael Bloomberg funded an effort to embed privately funded lawyers into the offices of state attorneys general (AGs) in nine states and the District of Columbia via the Bloomberg-funded State Energy Environmental Impact Center.
Bloomberg’s campaign effectively bypassing legislative budgets with “private mercenaries” engaged in “law enforcement for rent,” according to Chris Horner, a Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow.In Virginia, Republican lawmakersblocked the effort from reaching the Democratic AG in 2019.
Prosecuting Wrongthink
This time around Arabella’s goal appears to be to help the U.S. Justice Department prosecute climate “crimes,” according to the complaints.
As part of his “clean energy revolution,” Joe Biden promised on the campaign trail to “pursue [polluters] to the fullest extent permitted by law and . . . seek additional legislation to hold corporate executives personally responsible—including jail time when merited.”
Jailing dissenters is now “environmental justice,” to use lefty lingo.
Perhaps its Arabella’s liberal donors who should be most wary—the company isn’t so transparent nor trustworthy as it claims. Far from the boutique philanthropy advisors that doesn’t “engage in any kind of legislative activity,” the Arabella network is DC politics incarnate, according to outgoing CEO Sampriti Ganguli.
This is a developing story with more to follow.
Tags: Arabella Advisors, Co-Equal, Democracy Fund Voice, Democratic Party, environmental justice, George Soros, Green New Deal, Hopewell Fund, Open Society Policy Center, Pierre Omidyar, Sixteen Thirty Fund, skeptics
Hayden Ludwig
Hayden Ludwig is a Senior Investigative Researcher at Capital Research Center. He is also a columnist at the Washington Free Beacon. Ludwig is a native of Orange County, California, and…
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CLIMATE POLITICS ELECTRIC VEHICLES OPINION
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Alex Epstein: “It’s time for Larry Fink to come clean about fossil fuels”
2 days ago David Middleton 54 Comments
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Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #488
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COAL
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ggl alert 11 21
https://www.minotdailynews.com/opinion/national-columnists/2021/11/climate-democracy-dies-in-darkness/
tim graham
British leftist group calling itself the Center for Countering Digital Hate has issued a report on what it calls the “Toxic Ten,” which are so-called fringe websites spreading “climate change denial.” The ten include our group, the Media Research Center, as well as Breitbart, The Daily Wire, Townhall Media, Newsmax, The Washington Times and The Western Journal.
So, any challenge to Greenpeace climate-crackdown orthodoxy is now classified as “toxic” and “digital hate.”
Their solution? To press Facebook and Google to “stop monetizing” these conservative sites, stop allowing them to buy ads and to “comprehensively label” their climate reporting as misinformation. You don’t have to prove conservatives wrong. Just “comprehensively label” them as false.
Once again, the left wants to win debates by stopping any debate from happening. The founder of this “Digital Hate” squad is a man named Imran Ahmed, who previously co-authored the book “The New Serfdom: The Triumph of Conservative Ideas and How to Defeat Them,” with Angela Eagle, a Labour Party member of Parliament.
Ahmed can already count on jihad from the “objective media.”Their British socialist friends at The Guardian awarded their report with the headline “‘Super polluters’: the top 10 publishers denying the climate crisis on Facebook.”
Offering any criticism of climate panic (and climate policy) is “super polluting.” Does this sound like science, or does it sound like political hyperbole? Naturally, Ahmed told The Guardian, “big tech is once again on the wrong side of science, truth and human progress.”
The Washington Post also provided a pliant piece headlined “Breitbart has outsized influence over climate change denial on Facebook,report says.” Tech reporter Cat Zakrzewski warned, “The far-right news and commentary site is one of just 10 publishers responsible for nearly 70 percent of interactions with climate change denial content on Facebook.”
On Twitter, Zakrzewski gushed, “The nonprofit has been effective in drawing policymakers’ attention to falsehoods on social media, as it did with its ‘disinformation dozen’ report earlier this year.”
The Post reporter avoided any evidence of “falsehoods” by engaging with conservative articles. She blithely wrote that, “For years, Facebook has faced pressure to issue a broad ban on climate misinformation,” and that somehow doesn’t strike her as distasteful censorship.
My column on ClimateDepot founder Marc Morano’s book “Green Fraud” was pictured under the Daily Wire section of the report. The MRC section is illustrated with a Joseph Vazquez article on NewsBusters about … Marc Morano. He’s apparently Digital Hater No. 1.
In my Morano column, I noted that the climate panic lobby is never held accountable for failed predictions of doom from decades ago. In one PBS series called “Race to Save the Planet,” Meryl Streep claimed, “By the year 2000 — that’s less than 10 years away — the earth’s climate will be warmer than it’s been in over 100,000 years. If we don’t do something, there’ll be enormous calamities in a very short time.”
In 2021, that can be defined as climate misinformation.
But panic helps Democrats sell a crackdown.The Post story quotedSen. Sheldon “Whites Only” Whitehousecomplaining, “Facebook and other social media companies make money when they send users down rabbit holes of climate change denial. That’s a very dangerous business model for the future of the planet.”
Apparently, the “business model” is this: Only the leftists get to talk on climate policy; everyone else should be suppressed. No one is allowed to question the failed predictions and overwrought “solutions” of climate experts like Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The Washington Post should embrace their business model with the slogan “Climate Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
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Climate deniers are going all in with disinfo for COP26 (Sorry, Teslas really do produce fewer emissions)
As the world gears up for the COP26 climate negotiations in Glasgow next week, deniers are already laying the groundwork for the disinformation they’ll peddle in a hopefully-vain attempt to recreate their success in using Climategate disinformation to disrupt the Copenhagen COP.
While every year brings a new and exciting display of denial, a few recent stories stand out as top candidates for the fossil fueled opposition to latch onto when confronted with the possibility that letting polluters profit our planet to death is a bad idea.By Climate Denier Roundup
Though we can expect some totally-unhinged and _{unsubstantiated claims about banning beef,}_ one of the biggest recurring arguments is also one of the most misleading, that the Texas blackouts offer a warning of what climate policies will make common.
For example, Sean Spicer, who hasn’t quite danced his Trump-stained reputation clean yet, has a new book out, and the Koch-funded RealClear _{ran an excerpt}_. It opens with a heart-tugging story about a 12 year old who died of hypothermia, and then quickly exploits the child’s death to score cheap, and completely false, political points. The 80+ deaths “were caused by political decisions,” Spicer writes, and “the tragedy of the Texas blackout was partially the result of the growth of the green energy industry.”
But the majority of the _{responsibility for the blackouts}_ can be laid at the fossil fuel industry’s failure to do the one thing it claims it does best: Be reliable.
That reliability claim is also at the core of another strain of disinformation we’re seeing around COP26, which is the suggestion that the Teslas parked at the Gleneagles Hotel that the VIPs will use in Glasgow are going to be charged by diesel generators. “Couldn’t make it up,” _{one viral tweet claimed}_.
It was used as _{the basis for a ZeroHedge story}_, and the same narrative has been picked up by _{the UK’s Spectator}_ magazine, and the climate _{denial blog Watts Up With That}_.
The problem? Well, it turns out you could make it up, and they did, as it turns out it’s Jaguar-brand electric vehicles they’re using, not Teslas, and while the COP26 crew may use supplemental generators to charge the vehicles somewhere, Gleneagles Hotel has denied setting up any chargers, while conference organizers _{told Alastair Dalton for the Scotsman}_ that any spare generators are going to be filled with cooking waste oil, AKA biodiesel, not petroleum-based diesel.
Although unreasonable for faux-populist conservatives to attack the rich elite pushing for climate action, it does seem odd that they’re apparently incapable of doing so in an honest way, despite that being so very, very easy to do.
For example, _{**a recent New York Post op-ed**}_ does a fine job of criticizing the billionaire boy’s club of Bezos, Musk, Gates, and Jobs(‘s widow), but also throws in some fakery for good measure.
While Paula Froelich is correct that “the electric cars made by Musk’s Tesla are not emissions free,”she then goes on to claim that the Wall Street Journal showed that “building one of his cars actually generates more emissions because of the metals needed for its lithium-ion batteries.”
But when _{you click through to the WSJ story}_, the subheadline notes that while “there are caveats”, “EVs produce fewer emissions overall than their gas-powered counterparts.” That’s because while the manufacturing of an electric vehicle requires more materials than a gas-powered car, the pollution from refueling far outweighs that initial difference.
Drive a Tesla for more than (at most) 20,000 miles, and you’ve broken even on emissions.
Drive it for a car’s average lifespan of 150,000 miles, and not only has the EV cost you less in ownership (because electricity is cheaper than gas) but you’ve also generated less than half as much pollution.
So if they had ordered and produced new electric cars for the COP26, and then immediately scrapped them afterwards, then yes, that would be hypocritical and wasteful. But the UK government has already said that the cars “have all been sourced from existing fleets in the UK,” so there’s not even that initial manufacturing pollution to count, dramatically improving the emissions footprint.
But, as one local environmental campaigner, Colin Howden, told the Scotsman, what they could’ve done to reduce emissions even further (and avoid this issue all together) is have the dignitaries take advantage of the “fleet of new electric buses” in Glasgow.
(Originally appeared at DailyKos.)
cf baliunas talk on denier term: I have now been made aware of the Watts Up With That? article Climate Wars: Try Removing the Word “Denier” from a Wikipedia Entry where Eric Worrall says he started this as "an experiment". Oh. Then I shouldn't have taken it seriously. Unless others indicate support, I won't continue this particular argument. Peter Gulutzan (talk) 17:18, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
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420 anniv 10th
Anthony Watts
Anthony Watts is a retired TV meteorologist who founded the popular sceptics’ blog Watts Up With That (WUWT),where he was among the first to publish extracts of the emails. He is also behind surfacestations.org, a website questioning the validity of the surface temperature record.
Since the initial release of emails in November 2009, WUWT has published no less than 385 posts on Climategate, including coverage of the so-called “Climategate 2.0” where additional emails retained from the first hacking were later released.
Watts was involved in a document leak of his own in 2012. His name cropped up in a leaked fundraising strategy from the fossil fuel–funded think tank the Heartland Institute, which outlined how it pledged to raise $88,000 for a new website for Watts.
In 2019, Watts officially joined the Heartland Institute as a senior fellow.
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neglected? content lost? 5/17
bigtime escalator? along with morano?
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https://www.desmogblog.com/anthony-watts
December, 2015
Describing the results of his Surfacestations.org study, Watts said:
“The majority of weather stations used by NOAA to detect climate change temperature signal have been compromised by encroachment of artificial surfaces like concrete, asphalt, and heat sources like air conditioner exhausts.” [12]
May 5, 2014
Anthony Watts publishes a post on his blog, Watts Up With That, entitled, “Houston, we have a dumbass problem,” following a February 24 Oval Office meeting, and subsequent Washington Post article, where two of President Obama's top climate advisers presented “sharply-contrasting images of California's snowpack on Jan. 13, 2013 and a year later, as a way to underscore how global warming is changing conditions on the ground in the United States.” [13], [14]
“So tell me, oh geniuses, what will you show the President after the looming El Niño kicks in later this year, and California has a wetter than normal year during the winter of 2014/15 and the snow pack goes up to something like 146% of normal? What then? Blame that on global warming and call it another “Houston we have a problem” moment when we get flooding in California like in 1997/1998 after that big EL Niño changed the weather pattern in a single year to drench the state? The lack of snowpack in 2014 is all about ENSO and resulting jet stream patterns, something well known for years.” [13]
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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17524032.2018.1527378
- https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2018.1527378
The Circulation of Climate Change Denial Online: Rhetorical and Networking Strategies on Facebook
Emma Frances Bloomfield &Denise Tillery
Pages 23-34 | Received 04 Jul 2018, Accepted 19 Sep 2018, Published online: 07 Dec 2018
This study uses a topical, rhetorical approach to analyze how climate change denial circulates online through the 25 most popular posts on the Watts Up With That and the Global Warming Policy Forum Facebook pages.These groups adopt the appearance of credibility through reposting and hyperlinking, thus establishing a supportive, networked space among other skeptical sites, while distancing readers from original sources of scientific information. Visitors use a variety of rhetorical strategies to echo posts’ main themes and to discredit alternative viewpoints. Differences between the topoi and rhetorical strategies of WUWT and the GWPF show that the climate change denial community is multifaceted and makes use of social media affordances to craft the appearance of legitimacy. This project contributes to our knowledge of how scientific information is co-opted, manipulated, and circulated in online spaces and how online features shape environmental discourse practices.
KEYWORDS: Climate denial rhetoric, rhetoric of science, digital rhetoric, social media, networks
Internet Memes, Media Frames, and the Conflicting Logics of Climate Change Discourse
Andrew S. Ross et al.
Environmental Communication
Volume 13, 2019 - Issue 7
Published online: 24 Jan 2019
Echo Chambers of Denial: Explaining User Comments on Climate Change
Stefanie Walter et al.
Environmental Communication
Volume 12, 2018 - Issue 2
Published online: 21 Dec 2017
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thugswarm for adults? serengetti
Greta Thunberg, at age 16, has quickly become one of the most visible climate activists in the world. Her detractors increasingly rely on ad hominem attacks to blunt her influence.
Thunberg gained prominence after she began skipping some days of school to protest climate inaction outside Swedish parliament. She spearheaded the school walkouts that saw more than a million children across the globe leaving their classrooms to demand action on global warming.
She has addressed world and U.N. leaders and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Later this month, she'll sail across the Atlantic Ocean in a 60-foot yacht powered by solar panels and underwater turbines on her way to participate in the U.N. climate talks in New York (see related story).
But the success of Thunberg — who describes herself on Twitter as a "16 year old climate activist with Asperger" — remains a sore point for those who reject mainstream climate science and some who have helped shape or encourage the Trump administration's rollback of climate policy.
They frequently point to Thunberg's autism, claim she is used by her parents and compare her call to young people on climate change to "Hitler Youth." They have pointed to her "monotone voice" and framed her as a "millenarian weirdo" with the "look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes."
A recent opinion piece in The New York Times prompted an outcry among climate hawks and Thunberg's allies, who said the newspaper was validating these types of personal attacks on the teenage activist.
Experts say relying on ad hominem attacks has significant collateral damage in that they dissuade people with intellectual and developmental disabilities from speaking publicly. While the language of describing someone as a "puppet" or abused by adults may appear coded, it's clearly a dog whistle that signals her words should be discounted because her mind works differently, said Steve Silberman, author of "NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity."
"It's classic autism bashing," he said. "They feel at liberty to do it because autism has been framed as a pathology for decades, so they feel like they don't have to hold back, than just 'other' her, turn her into a freak when she's actually making more sense than 95% of the adults who have addressed this issue for the last 30 years."
Patrick Moore, chairman of the board of directors of the CO2 Coalition, which promotes the benefits of carbon dioxide, wrote on Twitter that "Greta=Evil." In an interview with E&E News, Moore denied that his numerous mentions of Thunberg's autism in media appearances and on social media were attacks on her disability but that he instead was "comparing her masters to Hitler."
He said that Thunberg's public speeches were written for her, that she was a "puppet" and that she was unable to answer questions in interviews because her ideas were not her own.
"They aren't her ideas," he said. "There's a reason why 16-year-olds don't vote, don't drink, don't drive, don't whatever. At that age, she is not an adult, and therefore she has no right to influence people in a political process."
Moore's group has been increasingly active on Capitol Hill and in the Trump administration. CO2 Coalition co-founder Will Happer is now serving on the National Security Council at the White House and spearheaded a shelved plan to conduct an "adversarial" review of climate science. Moore was recently invited by congressional Republicans to downplay an alarming U.N. extinction report.
Earlier this year, Trump enthusiastically tweeted a quote from a Moore performance on Fox News in which Moore said climate science was "fake news" and that more carbon dioxide would be good for humanity.
Moore said he was seeking to show Thunberg "is a full-blown tool of adults."
"She is being abused by her parents, by Al Gore, by society at large that is on side with this ideology as if there is a climate emergency," he said. "What a nonsensical, stupid concept, there is no climate emergency, I think you know, otherwise people would be fleeing from it."
While her critics claim to attack Thunberg for ideas, critiques that mention her personal traits are harmful and reliant on "prejudiced ideas about autistic people," said Zoe Gross, a spokeswoman for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. People are quick to label autistic traits, including tone of voice and facial expressions, as "creepy." She said criticism of Thunberg that highlights the way she speaks, answers questions and displays emotions is clearly an attempt to belittle her.
"Some people may be making assumptions out of ignorance ... but others are explicitly saying that autistic people are not worth listening to," Gross wrote in an email response to questions. "It's upsetting to see any person being belittled because of their disability, especially a child. People with all kinds of disabilities can form and express opinions, speak up for ourselves and others, and become advocates and leaders."
Thunberg's critics include those who have been close to the Trump EPA.
Steve Milloy, who served on the Trump administration's EPA transition team and has pushed to restrict the use of science at the agency, has referred to Thunberg as an "adult-exploited empty-headed child."
"She's ignorant, maniacal and is being mercilessly manipulated by adult climate bedwetters funded by Putin," he wrote recently on Twitter.
At his congressional hearing, Moore testified alongside Marc Morano, who works for the conservative Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and has a blog that misrepresents and attacks climate science. Morano has been invited by the Trump administration to EPA events weakening the role of science at the agency; he was photographed giving his book "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change" to former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. Morano's blog describes Thunberg as an "autistic prophet." In his Twitter feed, Morano retweets criticisms of her that center on her autism.
"She hasn't been called a mascot. Which; is really what she is. She'll get a Nobel Prize and a wanna-be Ph.d. from Harvard. For being autistic and not going to school," wrote one follower retweeted by Morano.
Conservative media have also begun using Thunberg's character traits in an attempt to minimize her words. A columnist at The Federalist, for instance, recently wrote that Thunberg's struggles with autism while growing up "bred in her an absolutist attitude that is far from attractive." An editor of the right-wing British magazine Spiked, which receives funding from the Koch brothers network,called Thunberg a "weirdo" and wrote that "there is something chilling and positively pre-modern about Ms Thunberg."
Andrew Bolt, a Sky News host, recently wrote a column that called Thunberg "deeply disturbed."
"I have never seen a girl so young and with so many mental disorders treated by so many adults as a guru," he wrote. "But Thunberg has something very rare as well: a sense of absolute certainty. She shows not the slightest doubt and forgives not the slightest compromise. This allows followers who are tormented with doubt and burden of freedom to relax into her totalitarian certainty. And in Thunberg's case, that certainty comes from what normally would be seen as a disability."
In the New York Times opinion piece, The Weekly Standard editor Christopher Caldwell called Thunberg a "complicated adolescent."
"Intellectually, she is precocious and subtle," Caldwell wrote. "She reasons like a well-read but dogmatic student radical in her 20s. Physically, she is diminutive and fresh-faced, comes off as younger than her years, and frequently refers to herself as a 'child' — about the last thing the average 16-year-old would ever do."
Thunberg's autism actually informs her activism and motivates her to speak out against the falsehoods spouted by climate deniers, said Silberman, the author of "NeuroTribes." He said she doesn't pay any attention to the false notion of a "debate" in climate science.
Thunberg speaks like "one of the few people who has woken up out of this fever dream of bullshit that's spread by these right-wing politicians and oil company misinformation," Silberman said.
"Unlike most neurotypical people, she can't just shrug off the fact that of course oil company executives are going to lie and politicians who are beholden to them are going to lie," he said. "She can't abide that, it bothers her almost viscerally."
For her part, Thunberg has said that autism is "not a 'gift'" but that it "CAN be a superpower."
"I've had my fair share of depressions, alienation, anxiety and disorders," she wrote in a Facebook post in April. "But without my diagnosis, I would never have started school striking. Because then I would have been like everyone else."
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/how-low-will-they-go-climate-deniers-are-getting-personal-to-attack-this-16-year-olds-activism/
kos
One of deniers’ favorite _{lines}_, used to justify the fact that basically everyone who isn’t paid by fossil fuels debunks everything they say, is thatif you’re taking flak, you must be close to the target. It comes from World War II, when bomber pilots came under increasingly heavy fire as they approached the German’s most valuable assets.
Judging by that criteria, deniers are feeling downright terrified of 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg.
While most school children are busy enjoying summer, this August began with a _{risible attack on Greta}_ by denier from down under Andrew Bolt, which _{predictably got picked up by WUWT.}_ To her credit, Ms. Thunberg seemed relatively unfazed by major Australian newspaper the Herald Sun running Bolt’s piece calling her “deeply disturbed,”_{ tweeting in response that}_ yes, she is “indeed ‘deeply disturbed’ about the fact that these hate and conspiracy campaigns are allowed to go on and on and on just because we children communicate and act on the science.”
And the day after Greta’s tweet, none other than the bastion of mainstream liberal media, The _{New York Times, ran an op-ed}_ attacking Thunberg. The piece was authored by Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at the conservative Weekly Standard. (Which may make you wonder about that “conspiracy campaign” targeting her.)
As Ted Macdonald notes _{in his Media Matters debunking}_ of Caldwell’s piece, the essay includes “basic climate denial and personal attacks” that “echo those that have been made in right-wing media ever since Thunberg rose to prominence.”
...We’ve known for years that theSerengeti Strategy is a key tactic of organized denial. Coined by one of _{its primary victims, Dr. Michael Mann}_, this is the term for the process of singling out and focusing negative attention on someone deniers are particularly threatened by–akin to how lions seek out a single individual on which to prey. Because it’s basically impossible for deniers to challenge the science and evidence, they instead target individuals in the hopes of harassing them into silence.
But the attacks on Greta go even further. As _{E&E’s Scott Waldman reported}_ on Friday, Thunberg’s openness about not being neurotypical has become a recurring theme to organized denial’s attacks.
In addition, then, to folks comparing her activism to the “Hitler youth,” accusations that she’s “being mercilessly manipulated by adult climate bedwetters funded by Putin,” and simple tweets like “Greta=Evil,” we’re seeing what autism expert Steve Silberman described to Waldman as “classic autism bashing.” Silberman explains how deniers “feel like they don’t have to hold back” and can “just ‘other’ her, turn her into a freak when she’s actually making more sense than 95% of the adults who have addressed this issue for the last 30 years.”
For example, Waldman mentions attacks on Thunberg’s “monotone voice” and “look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes” that apparently make her look like a “millenarian weirdo.” As autism advocate Zoe Gross points out, these could be examples of people “explicitly saying that autistic people are not worth listening to,” despite what should be an obvious fact that “people with all kinds of disabilities can form and express opinions, speak up for ourselves and others, and become advocates and leaders.”...As well they should. And it’s not even always much of a disability, with Thunberg herself saying while it’s “not a ‘gift,’” it “CAN be a superpower.” As Silberman describes: “unlike most neurotypical people, she can’t just shrug off the fact that of course oil company executives are going to lie and politicians who are beholden to them are going to lie. She can’t abide that, it bothers her almost viscerally.”
Which, yes, it should. It should bother all of us viscerally.
So while their attacks are even more re-Gretable than usual, it sort of makes sense that she would be targeted. As far as activists go, she’s already had an inGretable influence, and she’s just getting started.
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cornwall sci creds bs?
The signers of the Open Letter recognize that some radical environmentalists and religious activists oppose Mr. Pruitt because he does not embrace their exaggerated fears of human-induced global warming—fears that go well beyond the empirical evidence crucial to genuine science—or their antipathy to the development of the abundant, reliable, affordable energy indispensable to lifting and keeping whole societies out of poverty and the disease and premature death that invariably accompany it.
Signers therefore urge President-Elect Trump to stand firmly behind his nominee, as they commit themselves to supporting him in the confirmation process that lies ahead. Signers include:
- Neil L. Frank, Ph.D. (Meteorology), former Director, National Hurricane Center (1974–1987), Chief Meteorologist, KHOU-TV Houston (1987–2008);
- David Legates, Ph.D. (Climatology), Professor of Climatology and Geography, University of Delaware;
- Richard S. Lindzen, Ph.D. (Applied Mathematics), Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences Emeritus, MIT;
- Willie Soon, Ph.D. (Aerospace Engineering), independent scientist, Cambridge, MA;
- Roy W. Spencer, Ph.D. (Meteorology), Principal Research Scientist, Earth System Science Center, University of Alabama, Huntsville, AL, and Lead Scientist, NASA Aqua AMSR-3 Satellite Remote Sensing Program;
- James A. Wanliss, Ph.D. (Physics), Professor of Physics, Presbyterian College, Clinton, SC;
- Anthony Watts, American Meteorological Society-certified television and radio meteorologist (retired), owner of WattsUpwithThat.com, Chico, CA
“Senate Democrats, at the beck and call of environmental activists, are determined to prevent Mr. Pruitt’s confirmation, painting him as a ‘science denier’ or a ‘climate-change denier’, said Cornwall Alliance Founder and National Spokesman Dr. E. Calvin Beisner. “He is neither. He’s a solid, common-sense attorney general who will bring much-needed reform to the EPA.”
==
upping ante in rico death match? reprise of gore house?
http://desmogblog.com/2016/06/19/climate-science-denialist-blogger-anthony-watts-publishes-aerial-survey-scientists-homes-and-gets-almost-everything
Climate science denialist blogger Anthony Watts was sure he had a gotcha moment with some of his most hated figures caught red-handed.
Mysteriously popular blogger Watts had wondered how many vocal climate scientists “practice what they preach” when it comes to how they power their homes.
So Watts carried out what he described as an “aerial survey” but what others might call “looking at maps on Google” to look on the roofs of famous climate scientists to see if they had solar panels.
Watts was reacting to research finding that Americans were more likely to follow advice on cutting fossil fuel energy use from climate scientists who had also taken personal steps to decarbonize.
Imagine Watts’ delight to find the homes of celebrated scientists like Professor Michael Mann, Dr Jonathan Overpeck and Dr Kevin Trenberth, all bereft of photovoltaic panels. What hypocrites, right?
So Watts wrote a blog post with photos of the scientists' homes and then published it. What followed was a comedy of errors and corrections - a true car crash of climate science denial bloggery.
DeSmog checked with several of the scientists featured. First up is Dr Overpeck, of the University of Arizona, whose home, according to Watts, “seems completely devoid of solar power.” Overpeck told DeSmog:
“Watts is using an old image of our house perhaps? We have a good-sized array deployed on our roof. Yesterday we generated 59 kWh, which more than covered our own energy use, including air-conditioning on a hot day, and thus we fed the excess back into the utility grid.”
Oops.
Next up is Dr Trenberth, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, whose Colorado home was also sans solar panels, according to Watts' “aerial survey”.
Trenberth sent DeSmog pictures of his home to show panels on his roof (he later emailed Watts). He told DeSmog:
“I have had solar since 1986: firstly as hot water heating, and then when we moved to our current address in 2004, we installed pv panels.”
Oh dear.
But what about Professor Michael Mann, of Penn State University? Firstly, Watts got the wrong house. Cue rapid re-write with new image, apparently now showing Mann’s actual home. And look, still no panels.
Except Watts forgot that solar panels are not the only way of powering your home with renewables. Many people have agreements to purchase power from renewables. Mann told DeSmog:
“Anthony Watts has shown himself to be a sad, creepy, desperate man, who has nothing better to with his life than this. He apparently doesn’t understand the whole exercise was irrelevant from the start, since — as I have pointed out many times in the past — we have a plan in which all of our power comes from wind energy. As one Twitter commenter noted, we’ll probably finding him reduced to searching through people’s trash soon enough. The episode does nothing other than to demonstrate both the man’s lack of integrity and dullness of mind.”
Oops again! And ouch.
Watts had also apparently featured the homes of former NASA climate scientist Dr James Hansen, who has solar panels covering his outbuildings.
The home of Dr Thomas C. Peterson was also featured, and also showed solar panels (the only person left featured by Watts but not covered here is Dr Thomas Karl of NOAA. If we hear anything, we’ll let you know).
Watts claimed he had been careful not to reveal the addresses of any of the scientists featured, but wasn't careful enough. Earlier versions of the post and at least one image shared through social media did show street names. This angered UKjournalist Mark Lynas, who described Watts actions as “disgusting” ... ;You have no respect for privacy, this is disgusting. @MichaelEMann constantly harassed by you >Attorney Generals: The Climate Change-Gang< Scott Pruitt and Luther Strange, National Review Online
The Obama administration lawlessly rewards its supporters and punishes its enemies.
The United States was born out of a revolution against, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, an “arbitrary government” that put men on trial “for pretended offences” and “abolish[ed] the Free System of English laws.” Brave men and women stood up to that oppressive government, and this, the greatest democracy of them all, one that is governed by the rule of law and not by men, is the product.
Some of our states have forgotten this founding principle and are acting less like Jefferson and Adams and more like George III. A group of Democratic attorneys general has announced it intends to criminally investigate oil and gas companies that have disputed the science behind man-made global warming. Backed by green-energy interests and environmentalist lobbying groups, the coalition has promised to use intrusive investigations, costly litigation, and criminal prosecutions to silence critics of its climate-change agenda. Pretended offenses, indeed.
We won’t be joining this coalition, and we hope that those attorneys general who have joined will disavow it. Healthy debate is the lifeblood of American democracy, and global warming has inspired one of the major policy debates of our time. That debate is far from settled. Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind. That debate should be encouraged — in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress. It should not be silenced with threats of prosecution. Dissent is not a crime. The Clean Power Plan was promulgated without any consultation with Congress. No bills were debated, no votes were taken.
Sadly, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this tactic of advancing the climate-change agenda by any means necessary. President Obama’s Clean Power Plan is a particularly noteworthy example. This EPA regulation, one of the most ambitious ever proposed, will shutter coal-fired power plants, significantly increase the price of electricity for American consumers, and enact by executive fiat the very same cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions that Congress has rejected.
The Clean Power Plan was promulgated without any consultation with Congress. No bills were debated, no votes were taken, and the representatives of the American people had no opportunity to object or offer their own suggestions. The checks and balances built into our system of government were simply ignored as inconvenient impediments to the president’s agenda.
But in our states, we believe in and govern with respect for the rule of law, rather than by ambition to use the power of our governments to stifle political opponents. That is why we are part of a very different kind of coalition, a coalition of 29 states seeking to vindicate the rule of law by challenging the legality of the Clean Power Plan in our courts. The 29 states and state attorneys general who are part of this effort respect our proper role, which is neither to pick winners and losers in the energy sector nor to silence those with whom we disagree. Rather, our job is to hold the EPA accountable to the laws that created it and to fulfill our statutory duties to ensure that consumers in our states have access to reliable, affordable energy. We will continue to pursue those goals and to present our arguments in the courts and in the public square, treating our opponents with the respect they deserve.
It’s unfortunate that this respect is not always returned. In their press conference, the group of state attorneys general called themselves an “unprecedented coalition.” On this point, they are correct. Rarely in our nation’s history has the police power of the state been so eagerly used to intimidate citizens into silence. But even more troubling are internal e-mails and other documents that indicate that this coercion was orchestrated not by the attorneys general themselves, but by green-energy advocacy groups using these officials as puppets to further their extreme agendas. This should frighten us all. Outside groups should not be able to use the power of the government as a sword to go after their political opponents.
We do not doubt the sincerity of the beliefs of our fellow attorneys general about climate change and the role human activity plays in it. But we call upon them to press those beliefs through debate, not through governmental intimidation of those who disagree with them. Few things could be more un-American.
— Scott Pruitt is the attorney general of Oklahoma. Luther Strange is the attorney general of Alabama.
==
6/14
promoted to primary, since he has his own debunk site:
http://wottsupwiththat.com/
eg
White House science adviser attacks Roger Pielke Jr. for his Senate testimony, Pielke responds with a skillfull counterstrike
Posted on 2014/03/04
“White House science adviser attacks Roger Pielke Jr. for his Senate testimony, Pielke responds with a skillfull counterstrike“ (2014-03-01). Anthony Watts actually thinks Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., “skeptical” political scientist, can teach Dr. John P. Holdren, the American President’s Science Advisor as well as Past President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, about climate science!
Is this truculent hubris, or just plain old Dunning–Kruger syndrome? You can decide, but I’ll just whisper this to Anthony: “skillfull” is spelt “skillful”. I know, I know, it takes a lot of fingers to keep track of the “l”s. Also, “counterstrike” should have a dash in there somewhere.
I first read about this on HotWhopper, and was reminded by a post on Climate Progress. Thanks guys!
Republican Senator Jeff Sessions had recently tried to use Pielke’s testimony from July 2013 to run the old “nothing’s changed”/”warming is good anyway!” shell game while questioning Dr. Holdren (linked on Rabett Run). Dr. Holdren testified that increased drought in the American West and Southwest has been a consequence of anthropogenic climate change. Sessions tried to dispute this irritating fact using Pielke’s – totally honest-broker, like, fer sure – testimony claiming there hasn’t been a change in drought trends. Dr. Holdren promised to back up his testimony and put Pielke’s in context and did so a few days later. It makes for an amusing read, unless you’re Roger Pielke Jr.
When Dr. Holdren cited research confirming his testimony and exposed Pielke’s classic quote-mining, Pielke revealed his debating ninja skills a blog post titled John Holdren’s Epic Fail. First, the right-wing nutters at The Daily Caller oversold Pielke’s argument in its partisan coverage of the testimony and Dr. Holdren thought they were quoting Pielke directly. Oh, that’s terrible! But more importantly, while Pielke had written that there was no change in drought trends, but he put a little footnote-y thing to a journal paper that if you bothered to track down out of idle curiosity and then read the whole thing shows that there has in fact been an increase in drought in the West and Southwest. That’s how you win the internets. Otherwise it’s all hurt feelings and wailing about politicizing the purity of collegial science. “Tone” is a favourite fall-back position for Pielke.
So no, Anthony, shouting a lie (Pielke’s “Take Home Points”from his 2013 testimony) and then whispering the 180° opposite truth (in a completely opaque footnote) doesn’t count as a “skillfull counterstrike.” It’s just building an escape hatch into the lie.
==
Wackadoodle 350.org protesters disappear their KKK moment
Posted on :{February 13, 2014:(style="border:0px;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent"):}: by Anthony Watts
Last weekend I pointed out that 350.org leader Bill McKibben had endorsed the antics of some 350.org members in Texas that adopted tactics of the Klu Klux Klan – showing up at somebody’s house with mask covered faces, torches, and a threat:
==
koch doc confirms watts connection to heartland
==
revkin dot earth:...
Then came Watts’s new paper, which — as with his earlier efforts — is focused on questioning the quality of decades of temperature records generated by weather stations across the lower 48 states. It builds on Watts’s Surface Stations web project — which was challenged by federal climate scientists here, critiqued by the climate blogger Peter Sinclair here and defended here.
Given that the new paper from Watts and his team largely takes aim at the work of climate researchers at the National Climatic Data Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, I sought a reaction this morning from three of the scientists there responsible for temperature data and analysis — Peter Thorne, Matthew Menne and David Easterling. They wrote that they would not comment on the Watts paper prior to its publication but could offer some context. Here’s the note from Thorne defending the quality of temperature records in the United States (it’s a bit technical in spots):
Although we don’t want to comment on the draft pre-submission paper for obvious reasons, we have done quite a lot of work this past year that directly builds confidence in the verity of our adjustments to the United States Historical Climatology Network [USHCN] which it would be remiss not to mention in the context of current discussions. This is largely the result of efforts of Matt Menne and Claude Williams here at the National Climatic Data Center [NCDC]. I came to the party somewhat later. First off there are three published papers that have come out this calendar year which directly address the question at hand:
Firstly, NCDC submitted their technique to a major international intercomparison of homogenization techniques. Detailed [here], this intercomparison benchmarked performance by running against complex test cases. The pairwise algorithm used to create USHCN was amongst the top performers and had similar skill to the best manually intensive approaches with an incredibly low false positive rate.
Mann's move onto the offensive has generated widespread commentary from the blogosphere. For the most part there has been a great deal of support, for example on AGU blogs, Climate Crocks, Discover Magazine's Bad Astronomy, and many others, including comments on Mann's Facebook Page. However, a number of climate denialists have inexplicably sided with CEI and National Review's defamatory attack, for example Andrew Montford and WattsUpWithThat, among others.
Denialists Frothing Up the Abusers
There is a clear connection between the behavior at climate denialist blogs and the abuse directed towards climate scientists. Denialist blog posts constantly leap from their own flawed scientific analyses to the conclusion that climate scientists must be guilty of fraud, data manipulation, and other immoral behavior. The letters received by climate scientists contain this same sort of language, with baseless accusations of fraud and data manipulation, followed by abusive language and often death threats.
Climate denialist blogs are also the source of the CEI and National Review accusations of fraud, which soon warped into a denigrating comparison betwen an honest climate scientist and a serial child molester. [sandusky] Instead of condemning this reprehensible behavior, climate denialist ringleader WattsUpWithThat in particular appears to encourage it.
role in climategate: mojo
SOMETIME ON OR AFTER November 12, more than 1,000 emails between climate scientists and 3,587 other documents, including raw data and computer code, were copied from the CRU server. The files were posted online, with duplicates posted to several other servers around the world. At 7:24 a.m. EST [84], a link to the files appeared in a comment [85] on McIntyre's Climate Audit.
Around 7:30 a.m. that day, Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA and cofounder with Mann of RealClimate, awoke to find his site disabled. He attempted to log in and failed. When he finally got in as the administrator, he found that the files had been uploaded to the site. At that very moment, the hacker was using a ghost administrator account to try to create a blog post that linked to the files and quoted some portions of the emails.
Schmidt recalls, "I was going, 'What's this? Oh God, this is some emails. I wrote some of these emails.'" Schmidt emailed Mann, Jones, and other scientists whose emails were included.
That same evening, a comment on *Watts Up With That?* [86] (WUWT)—a prominent skeptic blog run by Anthony Watts, a former TV meteorologist—linked to the files posted on a Russian file transfer protocol (FTP) site. "We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps," read the comment. Charles Rotter, who moderates the site, did not approve the comment for public view, but he did download the files in order to read them himself.
Next, Rotter called his housemate, Steven Mosher. Mosher, who works in marketing in San Francisco, is a frequent contributor to Climate Audit, WUWT, and other skeptic blogs. He is a self-described "data libertarian" and lukewarmer who has agitated for increased access to the data and computer codes that climate scientists use. Mosher says Rotter and Watts requested that he take a look at the files and evaluate whether they were real before posting them. "We didn't know if they were a Trojan horse, a hoax, a trap, or the real deal," says Mosher.
One post included a list of 20 juicy teasers from the emails—among them a quote referring to a document as "dirty laundry" and an outside researcher asking for a chapter of a report by a UEA scientist to be "beefed up."
Meanwhile, the files were still being posted elsewhere. At 9:57 p.m., a commenter under the handle "FOIA" posted on the skeptic blog *Air Vent* [87] linking to the Russian FTP. This post included a list of 20 juicy teasers from the emails—among them a quote from Mann referring to a document as "dirty laundry" and an outside researcher asking for a chapter of a report by a UEA scientist to be "beefed up." The anonymous poster also sent a follow-up comment to WUWT asking why the original comment hadn't yet been published. Mosher says the IP address was traced to a server in Saudi Arabia; the poster was smart enough to cover the trail.
Mosher realized that several of the emails appeared to be from McIntyre to climate scientists, so late that night he called McIntyre, who confirmed that the emails were genuine. Mosher was still parsing the files two days later when he learned that they had already been posted on the Air Vent. He began submitting snippets of the emails to another skeptic blog called *The Blackboard* [88].
"You get to see somebody with the name of Phil Jones say that he would rather destroy the CRU data than release it to McIntyre," Mosher wrote. "And you get to see what they really say behind the curtain...you get to see how they 'shape' the news, how they struggled between telling the truth and making policy makers happy." As a writer on Andrew Breitbart's conservative news site *Big Journalism* [89] would later put it, Mosher "is to Climategate what Woodward and Bernstein were to Watergate. He was just the right person, with just the right influence and just the right expertise to be at the heart of the promulgation of the files."
Watts also helped to spread the word. He was returning from a conference in Brussels on November 19 when he logged on to his blog from Dulles International Airport and posted his first piece [86] about the files, citing the most damning emails: In one, CRU's Jones notes [90] the death of a skeptic as "cheering news"; in another, Jones refers to scientists [91] using a "trick" to "hide the decline" in temperatures that tree-ring data showed beginning in the 1960s. (The "trick"—substituting recorded temperature data when proxy data become unreliable—isn't intended to deceive; it's an acceptable practice in paleoclimatology, since most proxy data sets end around the 1980s, and recorded temperatures are more reliable, anyway.)
"It appears that the proverbial Climate Science Cat is out of the bag," wrote Watts. He said that he had alerted two of the most vocal deniers in the US: the CEI's Christopher Horner and Marc Morano, a former staffer for Sen. Inhofe. Morano is also the editor of *Climate Depot* [92], a Drudge Report-like clearinghouse for climate skeptics run by the oil-funded think tank Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow [93]. Blogger Terry Hurlbut posted [94] excerpts of the emails on a conservative news site, the Examiner.
heartland pledge $ for weather tracking stations?
=
Anthony Watts urges WattsUpWithThat readers to disrupt Forbes blog
By Joseph Romm
Yes, discredited former TV weatherman Anthony Watts can’t stomach even a couple of scientists posting reasonable comments about an error-riddled piece from Heartland on a blog already over-run by the pro-pollution crowd. He must marshall his readership to “shout them down in the comments section.”
Watts has, perhaps more than any other leading anti-science blogger, viciously smeared scientists — and tried to get his followers to game online voting and pile onto other people’s comments sections (see *Scientific American* “horrified” by “the co-opting of the poll” by users of “the well-known climate denier site, Watts Up With That”).
In a new post, he reprints another piece smearing climate scientists by Joe D’Aleo. By way of history, Watts and D’Aleo coauthored a “report” accusing top U.S. scientists of various kinds of misfeasance and malfeasance in the global temperature record. It was utterly debunked last March (see Wattergate: Tamino debunks “just plain wrong” Anthony Watts). As Tamino wrote, “your use of false claims to accuse NOAA scientists of deliberate deception was not just mistaken, it was unethical.”
Watts never retracted the attacks. Instead, last Memorial Day, Watts directly questioned the patriotism of both Tamino and Rabett (see “Peak readership for anti-science blogs?“) leading Tamino to write, “This just might be the most loathsome thing Watts has yet done with his blog.”
http://grist.org/article/2011-03-04-anthony-watts-urges-wattsupwiththat-readers-to-disrupt-forbes/
Willard Anthony Watts (Anthony Watts) is a blogger, weathercaster and non-scientist AGW denier who runs the website wattsupwiththat.com. He does not have a university qualification and has no climate credentials other than being a radio weather announcer.
Contents[hide] |
Education
Watts attended Purdue University from 1975 to 1982 but left without graduating.[1] A number of direct queries to Watts to find out if he graduated from college were rebuffed,[2] but a direct query to Purdue revealed that he did not obtain a degree from the university.[1]
Career
Watts began his broadcasting career, in 1978 in Lafayette, Indiana.[3]
Watts still works as a weatherman at KPAY 1290 AM radio in Chico, California.
Political advocacy
Watts is involved with the Butte County Republican Party, providing technical assistance and maintaining the website and domain registration.[4],[5]
Credentials
Credentials held
Watts held an American Meteorological Society Seal of Approval (a discontinued credential that does not require a bachelor's or higher degree in atmospheric science or meteorology from an accredited college/university)[6] with a status of "retired".[7]
Credentials not held
Some online lists incorrectly refer to Watts as "AMS Certified"[8], but this is incorrect; the American Meteorological Society reserves its "AMS Certified" designation for its Certified Broadcast Meteorologists and Certified Consulting Meteorologists[9], and Watts posesses neither certification.[10],[11]
Actions
SurfaceStations project
Claims of a temp. trend bias
In 2007, Watts founded SurfaceStations.org, to collect information on weather stations that are part of the United States Historical Climatological Network (USHCN) and Global Historical Climatological Network (GHCN). [12] Watts believed that, with the information collected via the website, "we will be able to demonstrate that some of the global warming increase is not from CO2 but from localized changes in the temperature-measurement environment."[13],[14].
Said Watts: "The vast majority of [the biases found] are warm biases, and even such things as people thinking a tree might in fact keep the temperature cooler doesn't really end up that way."[15]
Analyses in scientific papers: no temp. trend bias
Independent analysis, Menne et al 2010 show no temp. trend bias
Results of analyzing the SurfaceStations data did not match Watts's expectations; a NOAA analysis of the Surface Stations data showed "no indication from this analysis that poor station exposure has imparted a bias in the U.S. temperature trends."[16]
Watts paper 2011 shows no temp trend bias
A scientific paper on the SurfaceStations project, coauthored by Watts, came to the same conclusion as the Menne et al. paper.[15],[17]
Attempted takedown of YouTube video critique
In July 2009 Watts objected to a YouTube video critiquing his sceptic claims, claiming copyright infringement, and had it taken down.[18].
Video deemed fair use, restored
"The video has since been reviewed by a number of US copyright experts and ... there appears to be nothing that could be construed as anything but fair use", said Kevin Grandia shortly thereafter.[19]
"In accordance with established YouTube guidelines", Video creator Peter Sinclair reported[20], "I filed a "counternotice", affirming, "under penalty of perjury, that I have a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of a mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled." "
YouTube subsequently restored the video.[20]
The video Watts tried to ban
Op-ed writing
In October 2010 the Christian Science Monitor published an op-ed by Watts likening climate contrarian Hal Lewis's resignation from the American Physical Society to Martin Luther.[21]. The American Physical Society strenuously disagreed, saying "In light of the significant settled aspects of the science, APS totally rejects Dr. Lewisâ™ claim that global warming is a âœscamâ and a âœpseudoscientific fraud.â"[22],[23],[24]
"Leipzig Declaration" signatory
Anthony Watts is listed as a signatory on the "Leipzig Declaration", which said "there does not exist today a general scientific consensus about the importance of greenhouse warming from rising levels of carbon dioxide. In fact, most climate specialists now agree that actual observations from both weather satellites and balloon-borne radiosondes show no current warming whatsoever."
The signers of the Declaration are described as "climate scientists", although they include 25 weather presenters.[25] An attempt to contact the declaration's 33 European signers found that 4 of them could not be located, 12 denied ever having signed, and some had not even heard of the Leipzig Declaration. Those who verified signing included a medical doctor, a nuclear scientist, and an entomologist. After discounting the signers whose credentials were inflated, irrelevant, false, or unverifiable, only 20 of the names on the list had any scientific connection with the study of climate change, and some of those names were known to have obtained grants from the oil and fuel industry, including the German coal industry and the government of Kuwait (a major oil exporter).
Speaking
Watts was a speaker at the International Conference on Climate Change (2009) organized by the Heartland Institute think tank. [26] Watts is also listed as a speaker for the Heartland Institute's June 2009 Third International Conference on Climate Change.[27]
Businesses
In 1987, Watts founded ItWorks, which "supplies custom weather stations, Internet servers, weather graphics content, and broadcast video equipment." [28]; it is also known as IntelliWeather.
Watts is listed as the Managing Member of ZEV2Go, seller of an NEV-type electric car.[29]
Articles and resources
Related SourceWatch articles
- Global warming skeptics
- Heartland Institute
- Leipzig Declaration
- International Conference on Climate Change (2009)
- SourceWatch:Project:Creating Articles on Sponsors and Speakers at The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Scribe↔Purdue U. Registrar (June 2011). Anthony Watts did not graduate from Purdue (PDF). Staff. SourceWatch. Retrieved on 2011-07-02.
- ↑ Does Anthony Watts have a college degree?. Retrieved on 2011-05-12.
- ↑ News Team. KHSL-TV 12. Retrieved on 2001-03-06. âœAnthony began his broadcasting career, in 1978 in Lafayette, Indiana.â
- ↑ Steve Thompson (2008-09-27). Update from Steve Thompson. Butte County Republican Party. Retrieved on 2010-11-16. âœAs most of you know by now, both of our Republican Headquarters are fully up and running, along with our website thanks to Anthony Watts.â
- ↑ Author unknown (2008-10-06). Chico City Council debate tonight â“ support our candidates, live webcast available. Butte County Republican Party. Retrieved on 2010-11-16. âœA live webcast is also available, courtesy a system provided by Anthony Watts.â
- ↑ "REQUIREMENTS FOR THE AMS SEAL OF APPROVAL PROGRAM". American Meteorological Society. Retrieved on 2009-11-08. âœ"Applications for the AMS Seal of Approval Program will be accepted until 31 December 2008. After that date, only applications for the AMS Certified Broadcast Meteorologist Program will be accepted."â
- ↑ "List of AMS Television Seal Holders". American Meteorological Society (2009-11-05). Retrieved on 2009-11-08.
- ↑ Warming Scare Tactics - Skeptical Scientists (2008). Retrieved on 2008-11-08. âœ"Anthony Watts, AMS Certified (sic), Chief Meteorologist KPAY-AM, USA"â
- ↑ "Guidelines for use of the AMS Name, Seal, and Logos". American Meteorological Society. Retrieved on 2009-11-08. âœ"Sealholders may not refer to themselves as 'certified by the AMS' because that designation is reserved for individuals with the CBM or CCM certification."â
- ↑ "List of AMS Certified Broadcast Meteorologists (CBM)". American Meteorological Society (2009-11-05). Retrieved on 2009-11-08.
- ↑ "List of AMS Certified Consulting Meteorologists (CCM)". American Meteorological Society (2009-11-19). Retrieved on 2009-11-23.
- ↑ "About," SurfaceStations.org, accessed March 2009.
- ↑ Bill Steigerwald, "Helping along global warming," The Tribune-Review (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), June 17, 2007.
- ↑ Anthony Watts (2009-03-10). Weather Station Siting Issues within the USHCN Surface Station Network (.mp3). Heartland Institute Conference. Retrieved on 2009-12-26.
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 Tim Lambert (2011-05-13). Anthony Watts contradicted by Watts et al. Deltoid. Retrieved on 2011-07-16. âœNow that Watts et al has been accepted for publication we find that his paper says the opposite [of Watts unofficially] and gets the same result as Menne at al: '[...] the overall mean temperature trends are nearly identical across site classifications.'"â
- ↑ Talking Points related to concerns about whether the U.S. temperature record is reliable (pdf). National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (2009-07-06). Retrieved on 2009-11-08. âœ"for detecting climate change, the concern is not the absolute temperature â“ whether a station is reading warmer or cooler than a nearby station over grass â“ but how that temperature changes over time."â
- ↑ Tim Lambert (2011-05-26). Counterpoint fails to make correction. Deltoid. Retrieved on 2011-07-16.
- ↑ Be sceptical of climate sceptics. The Climate Institute. Retrieved on 2011-07-16.
- ↑ Kevin Grandia (2009-07-28). Climate Crock of the Week: What's Up with Anthony Watts [take 2]. DeSmogBlog. Retrieved on 2011-07-16.
- ↑ 20.0 20.1 Peter Sinclair (2011-08-19). - "Banned" Video Reinstated by YouTube. DeSmogBlog. Retrieved on 2011-07-16.
- ↑ Anthony Watts (2010-10-19). Climate change 'fraud' letter: a Martin Luther moment in science history -. Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved on 2010-10-21. âœEsteemed physicist Harold Lewis is calling global warming the 'most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen.' His resignation letter could mark the unraveling of one of the great scientific mistakes in history and the beginning of a needed reformation of the scientific community.â
- ↑ Eli Rabett (2010-10-20). The American Physical Society Calls Tony Watts a Clown. Rabett Run. Retrieved on 2010-10-21. âœMr. Watts,The American Physical Society (APS), a leading organization of physicists, takes great umbrage to your analogy likening Dr. Harold Lewisâ™ resignation from APS to that of the plight of Christian theologian Martin Luther. Global climate change concerns science, not religion, and Dr. Lewisâ™ resignation bears no likeness to the Great Reformation. Furthermore, on the matter of global climate change, APS notes that virtually all reputable scientists agree with the following observations:[...] In light of the significant settled aspects of the science, APS totally rejects Dr. Lewisâ™ claim that global warming is a âœscamâ and a âœpseudoscientific fraud.ââ
- ↑ Tawanda W. Johnson, APS Press Secretary (2010-10-12). APS Comments on Harold Lewis♠Resignation of his Society Membership. American Physical Society. Retrieved on 2010-10-21.
- ↑ Eli Rabett (2010-10-20). Kerry Emanuel Nails Hal Lewis. Rabett Run. Retrieved on 2010-10-21. âœIn July of 2010, Emanuel published a comment on the state of climate science on the National Association of Scholars web site. Everyone should read it. RIGHT NOW, that means you.â
- ↑ How many climate researchers support the "Leipzig Declaration"?
- ↑ "Speakers," Heartland Institute website, accessed January 2009.
- ↑ Heartland Institute, "Speakers", Heartland Institute, accessed May 7, 2009.
- ↑ "Personnel details: Mr. Anthony Watts," Heartland Institute website, accessed March 2009.
- ↑ ZEV2Go LLC Entity Details. Nevada Secretary of State. Retrieved on 2009-11-08.
External resources
- WattsUpWithThat.com, Anthony Watts' personal blog, which often addresses climate change
External articles
- DeSmogBlog â” Watts Up With the Internet? Motivated Bias on Climate Skeptic Blogs
Anthony Watts urges WattsUpWithThat readers to disrupt Forbes blog: âœshout them down in the comments sectionâ
joe romm tp climate progress 8/11
Yes, discredited former TV weatherman Anthony Watts canâ™t stomach even a couple of scientists posting reasonable comments about an error-riddled piece from Heartland on a blog already over-run by the pro-pollution crowd. He must marshall his readership to âœshout them down in the comments section.â
Watts has, perhaps more than any other leading anti-science blogger, viciously smeared scientists â” and tried to get his followers to game online voting and pile onto other peopleâ™s comments sections (see *Scientific American* âœhorrifiedâ by âœthe co-opting of the pollâ by users of âœthe well-known climate denier site, Watts Up With Thatâ).
In a new post, he reprints another piece smearing climate scientists by Joe Dâ™Aleo. By way of history, Watts and Dâ™Aleo coauthored a âœreportâ accusing top U.S. scientists of various kinds of misfeasance and malfeasance in the global temperature record. It was utterly debunked last March (see Wattergate: Tamino debunks âœjust plain wrongâ Anthony Watts). As Tamino wrote, âœyour use of false claims to accuse NOAA scientists of deliberate deception was not just mistaken, it was unethical.â
Watts never retracted the attacks. Instead, last Memorial Day, Watts directly questioned the patriotism of both Tamino and Rabett (see âœPeak readership for anti-science blogs?âœ) leading Tamino to write, âœThis just might be the most loathsome thing Watts has yet done with his blog.â
Watts often feigns a demeanor of reasonableness, as when he had the chutzpah to write in June:
Overall thereâ™s too much pointless bluster and sniping in climate science. I wish there was a volume control. Kids, can we just all âœget alongâ?
Seriously, a volume control â” but only for others, as it turns out.
Later in August he demanded others âœdial back the rhetoric.â
But by September, he was back to â˜normalâ™. When the demented, violent James Lee held people hostage with a gun and bombs strapped to his body at the Discovery Communications building in Silver Spring, MD, Watts wrote hismost offensive headline to date:
And the first line of that post is âœWell, you filthy readers, see what happens when we donâ™t acquiesce?✠And then amazingly, after being widely criticized, Watts wrote that he stood behind his offensive post and comments.
And that brings us to the Dâ™Aleo post:
âœScientistsâ Pull a Snow Job on Reporters in Teleconference
Itâ™s is just another excuse to smear climate scientists and spread disinformation. Watts had previously attacked NSIDC director Mark Serreze. Now he reposts Dâ™Aleo writing about a âœteleconference yesterday with a very confused Jeff Masters of Weather Underground, opportunist Mark Serreze of NSIDCâ in a piece that doubles down on the smear: âœBefore Serreze took over NSIDC seeing the huge grant funding windfall opportunityâ¦.â Yes, scientists are just in for the money.
By way of background, for years, Watts has been at the forefront of trying to push the anti-science meme that big snowstorms disprove global warming. But whenever scientists have pushed back, explaining how big snowstorms are entirely consistent with climate science, he then launches another error-riddled smear.
Whatâ™s especially funny about this post is that Watts canâ™t even decide if climate scientists have always predicted global warming would increase extreme precipitation events or whether this is something new.
The Dâ™Aleo post asserts:
Now the alarmists have flipped their position claiming warming means more snowâ¦.
And the Taylor post that Watts claims it supports his position is headlined, âœGlobal Warming Alarmists Flip-Flop On Snowfall.â
But Watts leads his post with the cover of a 1996 Newsweek issue, âœBlizzards, Floods & Hurricanes: Blame Global Warming,â and Wattsâ™ own caption is âœSome things never change.â
Watts is a simultaneously attacking climate scientists for, supposedly, flip-flopping on whether global warming will lead to more severe snowstorms â” and for always saying it would!
For the record, the Newsweek headline was, as you might expect, not what the stories inside were actually about.
One of the articles, about the big January 1996 blizzard added a question mark âœThis Is Global Warming?â and didnâ™t talk about global warming. The other piece was by science reporter Sharon Begley, about James Hansen, âœHeâ™s Not Full Of Hot Air,â which actually does a pretty good job of explaining the state of the science in this area:
Meaner storms: ⦠one alarming prediction seems to be coming true: the expectation that, in a warmer world, extremes of wet and dry will intensify. As Earthâ™s surface warms, more moisture evaporates. Over arid regions, where thereâ™s little to evaporate, turning up the thermostat would exacerbate droughts. Rainfall would thus increase over moist areas, like the coasts, and be rarer in the interiors of continents. âœThe odds of getting drought years will increase markedly,â says Jerry Mahlman, director of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Hurricanes, too, should get more intense. âœThe warmer the ocean gets, the meaner the tropical storm,â says A. E. (Sandy) MacDonald of NOAAâ™s lab in Boulder, Colo.
Last weekâ™s blizzard canâ™t be blamed on the warming world.No storm or drought or heat wave ever can be so neatly diagnosed. âœYou canâ™t connect a given weather event on a particular day in a particular place with long-term climate change,â says physicist Michael Oppenheimer of the Environmental Defense Fund. The snows of yesteryear prove that. The record Northeast blizzards of 1888 and 1947, after all, hit when the only greenhouse effect anyone cared about was the one that forces lilies to bloom for Easter. Extreme weather is connected to global warming more subtly. âœAll that long-term climate change can do is affect the probabilities,â Hansen explains. Instead of equal chances that any one storm will be heavier or lighter than normal, or any one day hotter or colder than normal, the climate dice are now loaded. The greenhouse effect, says Hansen, âœhas changed the oddsâ on extreme weather.
Whatever its proximate cause, the blizzard of â™96 is just what a greenhouse world would whip up. The storm was born when cold air blew down from Canada. The arctic air happened to smack into a warm, moist air mass hovering over the Atlantic Ocean. In a warmer world, those chance circumstances could be more common. âœGlobal warming has made the Atlantic an even greater source of moistureâ from evaporation, Hansen says. And when water vapor condenses, becoming liquid again, the process releases heat. So warm moist air that feeds blizzards is more likely to be parked over the Atlantic, just waiting for the delivery of a cold mass. âœThe greenhouse effect alters the probabilities [of having the ingredients of a massive snowstorm],â says Hansen. âœIn that sense the greenhouse effect is changing our climate now.â
Basic stuff, well explained, which some editor mangled with the cover story headline. Just adding a question mark to that headline would have made it much better for a news magazine.
Yes, itâ™s true that, as Heartland and Dâ™Aleo point out, the IPCCâ™sThird Assessmentsaid of North America, âœMilder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms.â It would have been nice if the IPCC had been clearer about when exactly they thought that would happen. In general, the science always been pretty clear that the snow line would gradually move north, but the increase in moisture would lead to more extreme precipitation events of all kinds, with those events being snow when it was cold enough.
In any case, while Heartland and Dâ™Aleo quote a now 10-year-old (!) assessment, the scientific literature since then has said again and again that we would see more extreme winter storms thanks to human-caused global warming (see An amazing, though clearly little-known, scientific fact: We get more snow storms in warm years!). Iâ™m sorry to repeat myself, but thatâ™s what you have to do when the disinformers trot out 10-year-old reports.
Letâ™s look at the results of an actual, detailed study of âœthe relationships of the storm frequencies to seasonal temperature and precipitation conditionsâ for the years âœ1901-2000 using data from 1222 stations across the United States.â The 2006 study, âœTemporal and Spatial Characteristics of Snowstorms in the Contiguous United States✠(Changnon, Changnon, and Karl [of National Climatic Data Center], 2006) found we are seeing more northern snow storms and that we get more snow storms in warmer years:
The temporal distribution of snowstorms exhibited wide fluctuations during 1901-2000, with downward 100-yr trends in the lower Midwest, South, and West Coast. Upward trends occurred in the upper Midwest, East, and Northeast, and the national trend for 1901-2000 was upward, corresponding to trends in strong cyclonic activityâ¦..
Results for the November-December period showed that most of the United States had experienced 61%- 80% of the storms in warmer-than-normal years.Assessment of the January-February temperature conditions again showed that most of the United States had 71%-80% of their snowstorms in warmer-than-normal years. In the March-April season 61%-80% of all snowstorms in the central and southern United States had occurred in warmer-than-normal yearsâ¦. Thus, these comparative results reveal that a future with wetter and warmer winters, which is one outcome expected (National Assessment Synthesis Team 2001), will bring more snowstorms than in 1901-2000. Agee (1991) found that long-term warming trends in the United States were associated with increasing cyclonic activity in North America, further indicating that a warmer future climate will generate more winter storms.
The definitive recent report on the subject from the United States perspective is the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) U.S. Climate Impacts Report from 2009. It reviewed that literature and concluded:
Cold-season storm tracks are shifting northward and the strongest storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent.
Large-scale storm systems are the dominant weather phenomenon during the cold season in the United States. Although the analysis of these storms is complicated by a relatively short length of most observational records and by the highly variable nature of strong storms, some clear patterns have emerged.112 [Kunkel et al., 2008]
Storm tracks have shifted northward over the last 50 years as evidenced by a decrease in the frequency of storms in mid-latitude areas of the Northern Hemisphere, while high-latitude activity has increased. There is also evidence of an increase in the intensity of storms in both the mid- and high-latitude areas of the Northern Hemisphere, with greater confidence in the increases occurring in high latitudes.112 [Kunkel et al., 2008]The northward shift is projected to continue, and strong cold season storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent, with greater wind speeds and more extreme wave heights.68 [Gutowski et al, 2008]
Snowstorms
The northward shift in storm tracks is reflected in regional changes in the frequency of snowstorms. The South and lower Midwest saw reduced snowstorm frequency during the last century. In contrast, the Northeast and upper Midwest saw increases in snowstorms, although considerable decade-to-decade variations were present in all regions, influenced, for example, by the frequency of El Ni±o events.112 [Kunkel et al., 2008]
There is also evidence of an increase in lake-effect snowfall along and near the southern and eastern shores of the Great Lakes since 1950â¦
It Is also worth noting that the recent *Nature* study on the subject, which looked at the extreme precipitation data, including snow, found âœhuman-induced increases in greenhouse gases have contributed to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation events found over approximately two-thirds of data-covered parts of Northern Hemisphere land areas.â
The bottom line is that scientists predicted that human-induced increases in greenhouse gases would contribute to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation events, and the data now finds, with extremely high confidence, that this is true. And when it is cold enough, the intensified precipitation will come down as snow.
The extreme anti-science, pro-pollution bloggers like Watts may try to shout it down, but science, unlike right-wing politics, is not determined by who shouts the loudest.